Best SEO Practices for the Advanced Webmaster

The internet business scene is changing fast, which means that the only way you can stay ahead of the curve these days is by keeping in touch with new SEO tricks and the latest industry news on SEO research.

SEO Best Practices - Tricks of the Trade:

The following are some of the techniques that should be in a SEO’s checklist:

Picking SEO Keywords: Focus on Good Phrases

When it comes to SEO research, there may be no bigger misnomer, nor a more archaic term than the ubiquitous keyword. In my view, picking out the best keyword that represents your business, product or service is considered to be a vital pillar of the best SEO practices. Unlike the term that quite simply implies a single word, using multiple words as a keyword is a more preferred strategy of advance SEO. This technique is especially used when doing advance SEO research and selection in the service of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and SEO campaigns.

While doing SEO research, people dramatically overlook the most basic keyword research concepts which are to ask the question: ""What products or services do you sell?"" The keyword or key phrase should be coherent with your business.

Avoid the Vanity Keywords:

Sometimes we refer to a root keyword as ""vanity keywords,"" simply because if you do just one search to see who seems to be winning the SERPS space, you are likely to pick the single broadest keyword and see who comes up highly ranked. In every case of advanced SEO, it has been found that vanity keywords are more successful and deliver a significantly better return on your SEM investment by focusing on the specific terms that more closely match the services, products, or brands that you sell or serve.

Google’s Little Secret:

Picking SEO Keywords: Using Google's Wonder Wheel

The best kept secret of everyone's favorite search engine is, without a doubt, the Google Wonder Wheel or more famously – the Contextual Text Tool. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared to Google's much more visible search tools popular in SEO research, the Wonder Wheel can easily be accessed by doing a Google search and then selecting ""Wonder Wheel"" under the filter options on the left-hand navigation.

What you are presented with now is a visual representation of the way that Google groups together with keywords, making it one of the best options of advanced SEO research for your keywords, PPC and SEO research.

SEO Tricks Using Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a great program that can do a lot more than what people realize. Here are just a few features that you could use in your SEO research:

Filter Out Domains:

This is a great SEO trick. While you are doing your advanced SEO research, let’s say your Google Analytics code somehow gets on another site and your stats are getting tainted with irrelevant data. No problem! You can create a filter to not count anyone who is outside the domain you have added.

Export to Excel:

For any newbie’s who are looking for the best SEO practices, this is a time saving feature. Just about any report can have the data exported to a CSV file which Excel can open. So, you can now stop copying and pasting all that data out of Google Analytics and into Excel and save yourself some time.

Filter Yourself Out:

This feature is a must do for any business. Find your static IP address and then set up a filter so that Google knows not to include traffic from your company network. This ensures that your stats are not inflated due to employee’s wild surfing habits. This is also something that should be considered for any partner companies.

Use Schema.org:

Speaking of SEO tricks, Schema markup has been on the SEO radar for almost two years now and its importance continues to grow. Schema.org “provides a collection of schemas, i.e. html tags that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.” Schema.org is preferred by Google over RDFa or microformats."